Sunday Night at the Movies

As with all graphics on Fox Classics, the palette for this spot was restricted to orange, black and white. Being that this is Sunday “Night” at the Movies, it made the most sense to use black as the base color. Most of these movies are from the 60’s/70’s and when I heard the music (The Supremes) I thought of one of those old 70’s-style beaded door curtains and decided to use that as the basis of the design. Instead of beads I made an old-style TV screen shape in Illustrator and copied it as a mask into After Effects. Each bead layer was positioned in 3D space with the following expression applied to the Y-Rotation property to make it spin gently back and forth:

offset = index;
Math.sin(time + offset)*50

Making “index” the offset means that when one layer is duplicated it won’t rotate identically to the next. Change the “50” value for more or less rotation. You can also adjust the Y-Orientation value separately for more control over the look.

This next expression was applied to the Scale property of the rotating TV screens. This flips a layer depending on whether it’s facing the camera or not and ensures a text/image layer isn’t presented backwards when it spins around:

I wanted these movies to look like new releases so color graded them heavily to freshen them up. To add glamour I used Knoll Light Factory for the background flares and Tinderbox Starfield (now obsolete) combined with After Effects Camera Lens Blur for the blurred lights – which also add depth to the spot.

Does anyone know what the actual theme song for Fox classics is? It’s stuck in my head since I saw the new commercial, which is how I happened upon this site. Great artwork by the way, I really like the new ad.

Beautiful! I just love the fluidity and color treatment. So, Master John, will there be a tut or eSeminar? Or perhaps a dvd product for sale that would include five of your top designs and the tuts behind them? I’ve got my credit card out now!

(Blush) Thanks for your comment. No, I’m not a model. I only play one on TV. Seriously, if you’d consider
selling a disk of your top designs, your thoughts behind it, work flow, etc., I’d buy it and so would many others.

The work is obviously wonderful, but what I can really appreciate is the quality of your render. Can you tell us how you are rendering out of AE and then how you are compressing it to flash – that would be a very useful information.
I think I speak for most of us that some more info on how to show our work on the web at top clarity as you have here would be very welcomed!